Wanda's Dirge by Brad C. Baker

Author:Brad C. Baker [Baker, Brad C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wallace Publisher
Published: 2019-07-26T06:00:00+00:00

Arylae bounded across the tundra. Her fur fluffed out by the chill wind. Her nose rose into the wind and she sniffed, seeking familiar scents. She had been loping along an east, southeast trajectory. A scent caught her nostrils, causing her ears to flatten to the sides, and a rumble to rise in her throat. Her whiskers twitched as she scented a canine odour. She kept going onward, although her loping stride had slowed to a hunting prowl.

Twilight had set when she heard the howl crisply pierce the chill breeze. It carried to her ears from the south. The answering call came from the north. This wasn’t good. She was being hunted. It was like her master. He had her go off and drive prey to him. This would seem to be the same. She felt that she should answer kind with kind. So, raising her own head to the cresting moon, she roared. It was a sound unlike anything the tundra had ever heard. She then turned her pacing into the south, making a beeline to the driver of the hunt, not towards the trap. This decision might buy her a moment or two, before things got really intense.

The brown eyes rimmed by white widened in alarm as its prey hadn’t done what was intended. The large amber pools of malice narrowed in delight. Within a heartbeat, both predators were in motion.

The great cat lunged. The tundra dog dodged. The wolf was an eye-blink slower. The massive canines of the tiger drove through the thick fur and tough skin into the wolf’s shoulders, slowing it enough to get her retractable claws pierced deep into its back and side. Her weight pinned the snarling and screaming wolf to the ground. A second, swift bite at the base of its neck, crunched through both the creature’s neck, and severed its panicked cry for aid.

Not taking her eyes off of her now swiftly cooling foe, Arylae’s right ear rotated slightly in the cool air, to better pick up a sound she thought she detected. There was a paw landing among a tuft of grass; a heavy exhale of air from taxed lungs. Silence.

The white markings on the back of her ears were intended to provide a confusion as they, in dim light, appeared as eyes, making it difficult to determine the direction that the striped cat was facing. Her eyes, her real ones, darted back and forth along the tundra, seeking her attackers. She raised her blood-soaked muzzle as, amongst a chorus of yips and ruffs, and snarls and growls, seven wolves launched themselves at her flanks.

Arylae sprang from her kill as five of the lunging beasts collided with her flank. Teeth bit into her two shoulders, one catching the ruff of the back of her neck, and another, her back leg. The final one sent a searing pain up the length of her tail.

Arylae’s massive bulk and predator’s tone helped her withstand the onslaught of the cumulative mass of the impacts.

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